Forgiveness for Bitter Days

Her voice was warm. "You have a big family." Before long another aunt invited him to Cleveland for a Thanksgiving reunion and filled the week with a lifetime of belated love.

And then, after days of calls and attempts, his family found his mother's brother. He offered to take Antwone to the housing project where she lived. On the drive Antwone rehearsed the questions he'd longed to ask for the last three decades:

Why didn't you come for me? Didn't you ever wonder about me? Didn't you miss me at all?

But the questions were never uttered. The door opened, and Antwone walked into a dimly lit apartment with shabby fur­niture. Turning, he saw a frail woman who looked too old to be his mother. Her hair was uncombed. She wore her night-clothes.

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Antwone's uncle said to her, "This is Antwone Quenton Fisher." Antwone's mother made the connection and started to moan, losing her footing, holding on to a chair. "Oh, God, please...Oh, God." She turned her face away in shame and hurried out of the room, crying.

Antwone learned that his mother had tried to get a man to marry her so she could raise her son, but couldn't. She had gone on to bear four other children, also raised as wards of the state. Over the years she'd been hospitalized, incarcerated and put on probation. And when he realized how painful her years had been, he chose to forgive.

He writes, "Though my road had been long and hard, I finally understood that my mother's had been longer and harder... Where the hurt of abandonment had lived inside me, now there was only compassion."²

In the end, we all choose what lives inside us. May you choose forgiveness.

2. Antwone Quenton Fisher, "I Once Was Lost," Reader's Digest, July 2001, 81-86.

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Excerpted with permission from Every Day Deserves A Chance: Wake Up to the Gift of 24 Little Hours by Max Lucado, Thomas Nelson Publishers, copyright 2007.